Was this ever brought to a conclusion? I missed the thread at the time
and only just noticed it.
I believe the answer is in two parts:
1 For a local file there is no default. If the filesystem provides
out-of-band metadata, you can use that, otherwise you're on your
own.
2 On the wire, the specifications of MIME and HTTP govern the
default. The default in MIME for all text/* types is US-ASCII.
In HTTP the default is ISO-8859-1.
That leaves FTP and other protocols undefined, of course, but I'm not
sure that's our responsability.
Yung-Fong Tang writes:
>
>
> Erik van der Poel wrote:
>
> > Yung-Fong Tang wrote:
> > >
> > > CSS2 define @charset to specify charset of the CSS file while it is
> > > stand along CSS file. Can someone tell me what is it's default value
> > > whiel this @charset is not present ? Assuming there are no HTTP and the
> > > data is neither UTF-16/UTF-32 nor EDBIC
> > >
> > > Is it UTF-8 ? ASCII ? or ISO-8859-1 ?
> > > Where does it specify ? URL ? sections in CSS2 spec.
> >
> > See the following part of the CSS2 spec:
> >
> > http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/syndata.html#q23
>
> Yes, I know that section. But that section does not answer my question at
> all. I send out my mail after I cannot find the answer from that section.
>
>
> > My opinion is that it is reasonable to default to whatever charset has
> > been set in the user's menu, which might be an auto-detector.
> >
> > Erik
>
> I favor default to UTF-8.
>
Bert
--
Bert Bos ( W 3 C ) http://www.w3.org/http://www.w3.org/people/bos/ W3C/INRIA
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